About Us

Mercury Theatre

The Mercury Theatre was an independent repertory theatre company founded in New York City in 1937 by Orson Welles and producer John Houseman. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programs, and motion pictures. The Mercury also released promptbooks and phonographic recordings of four Shakespeare works for use in schools.

After a series of acclaimed Broadway productions, the Mercury Theatre progressed into its most popular incarnation as The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The radio series included one of the most notable and infamous radio broadcasts of all time, "The War of the Worlds", broadcast October 30, 1938. The Mercury Theatre on the Air produced live radio dramas in 1938–1940 and again briefly in 1946.

Mercury Theatre

X Minus One is an American half-hour science fiction radio drama series that broadcast from April 24, 1955 to January 9, 1958 in various timeslots on NBC. Known for high production values in adapting stories from the leading American authors of the era, X Minus One has been described as one of the finest offerings of American radio drama and one of the best science fiction series in any medium.

Dimension X

Dimension X was an NBC radio program broadcast mostly on an unsponsored, sustaining basis from April 8, 1950 to September 29, 1951. The first 13 episodes were broadcast live, and the remainder were pre-recorded. Fred Wiehe and Edward King were the directors, and Norman Rose was heard as both announcer and narrator, opening the show with: "Adventures in time and space... told [or transcribed] in the future tense..." For two months beginning on July 7, 1950 the series was sponsored by Wheaties

Jean Shepherd

Born in 1921 on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, Shepherd briefly lived in East Chicago, Indiana, and was raised in Hammond, Indiana, where he graduated from Hammond High School in 1939.  The movie A Christmas Story is loosely based on his days growing up in Hammond's southeast side neighborhood of Hessville. As a youth, he worked briefly as a mail carrier in a steel mill and earned his amateur radio license (W9QWN) at age 16, sometimes claiming he was even younger. He sporadically attended Indiana University but never graduated. Shepherd was a lifelong Chicago White Sox fan.

During World War II, he served stateside in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.  Shepherd then had an extensive career in a variety of media.